Review of the film “Hemingway and Gellhorn”

Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012)
Hemingway & gellhorn
biographical, drama, melodrama
Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Clive Owen, David Strathairn, Rodrigo Santoro, Molly Parker
Retro from the HBO channel is usually a quality mark: carefully selected costumes and exactly corresponding to the era of hairstyles, an excellent work of the art director, and as a result – a great picture. The biographical drama about the years spent by Hemingway with journalist Martha Gellhorn was directed by Philip Kaufman, the author of the already classic “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988) and the unforgettable biography “Henry and June” (1990). The mini-series “Hemingway and Gellhorn” is not only remarkable for the participation of superstars, but also for stylish, carefully simulated retro frames, where the actors seem to be inscribed in the old newsreel on a faded film, sometimes illuminated with grain.

Shot from the movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn”
Hemingway (Clive Owen) meets Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) at a bar in Key West in 1936. It is impossible not to notice her: she has male habits, a bold disposition and unusually long legs. He is a famous writer, already surrounded by a crowd of hangers-on who respectfully called him “Papa”. She is an experienced journalist who has traveled all over the country during the Great Depression, but is dreaming of a war correspondent career. At that time, “Papa” was deeply married with a second marriage, which did not deter him from a trip to Spain – from the Madrid hotel “Florida” he will write reports on the Civil War. But Gellhorn effectively drove up to the front door to the “Florida” on the tank – that’s just military reports she still can not write. “And you just sit in front of a typewriter and run out of blood,” Hemingway will tell her.

Shot from the movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn”
The Florida Hotel was inundated with journalists from all over the world, many gained fame by working under bullets in the Spanish war – like photographer Robert Capa (Santiago Cabrera), who made his most famous photographs at that time. The Russians also lived in the hotel. The most famous of them was gloomy, like a black raven, forever walking in the warm Madrid with earflaps, Mikhail Koltsov (Tony Shelhaub), apparently working on this scene not only as a journalist. Hemingway suspects that it was the Stalinist agent Koltsov who was involved in the mysterious disappearance of anti-fascist Paco Zarra, compromised by kinship with the rank from Franco’s entourage. But politics was politics, and the relationship between Hemingway and Gellhorn in the most romantic situation for both – in a hotel where plaster fell from the ceiling during shelling – developed rapidly

Shot from the movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn”
They married in 1940 and settled in Cuba, but, as Gellhorn later admitted, she was the worst sex partner on five continents, and all the time she strove to run away from home for another war.

Shot from the movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn”
“He taught me not to think that planes are looking for me, and a bullet with my name has already been cast somewhere,” Gellhorn says in the voiceover about the impact that marriage with this man had on her. But their relationship “in civilian life” more and more resembled rivalry: “We got along in the war, but as soon as it ended, we started our own.”

The series tells in detail about all the stages of the relationship through which these people went, adhering to the well-known facts of their biographies, but not at all romanticizing these relationships. Hemingway is a notorious macho who is not embarrassed to compete with his wife, steal the work of a correspondent from her, and then throw in her face the arrogant: “I did you!” And ruthless: “It would be better if you married the war.” Gellhorn survived her far more famous husband by almost thirty years. In the last shots of the television movie, its creators did not escape some pathos – being completely gray-haired, having lost illusion, but having not lost morale, Gellhorn is still the same, with impudent temper and manly habits, goes to write her honest reports from the next – this time Vietnam – war .